Update: I will not be doing this, see post 48
Hi all,
This is a heads-up that sidewalks are now being given name
s in Toronto. I believe this is an improvement. I welcome comments. If this is accepted by the community, I would add a note about it to the Toronto OSM wiki page.
Longer introduction
Sidewalks were mapped as separate ways in Toronto and surrounding area quite early on. With imagery available at the time, they were often not particularly accurate, and if I may say so, were often mapped with focus seeming to be on quantity over quality: geometry was poor, crossings were not split out, and the sidewalk ways were often kilometres-long.
I saw sidewalks have names in Montreal, and we also agreed that separate cycleways should have names. So I decided to start doing the same in Toronto (example way). I saw PcMouse1 has joined in (example) – I didn’t message them about the idea so it must have been organic.
A couple of these changes were reverted, apparently by mappers thinking them an error (1, 2), so I want to make a higher-profile announcement now.
Rationale
Sidewalks mapped as nameless ways make text or voice routing impossible.
Here are sample routing instructions from Valhalla in Toronto:
Distance: 517m. Time: 0:06.
1. Walk south on the walkway. 140m
2. Turn left onto the walkway. 90m
3. Turn right onto the crosswalk. 20m
4. Turn left onto the walkway. 110m
5. Turn right onto the walkway. 100m
6. Turn left onto the walkway. 60m
7. You have arrived at your destination.
And here are sample routing instructions from Valhalla in Montreal:
Distance: 492m. Time: 0:06.
1. Walk southeast on Rue De Lanaudière. 300m
2. Turn right onto Avenue du Mont-Royal Est. 50m
3. Turn left onto the walkway. 20m
4. Turn right onto the crosswalk. 10m
5. Bear right onto Avenue du Mont-Royal Est. 50m
6. Turn left onto Rue de Brébeuf. 80m
7. You have arrived at your destination.
Potential objections
-
Won’t having the street name duplicated cause confusion? Not any more than currently - we already have street name duplicated whenever the roadway is split even by a traffic island and on divided carriageways. In extreme cases we already have the street name four times.
In practice this looks fine to me in Montreal:
-
This is too much work. Mapping and cleaning up sidewalks as separate ways was always going to be a lot of work. Nevertheless that has been the norm here for over 10 years so that’s not going to change. If the ways are being kept, I want them to at least be useful. I appreciate that retrofitting the currently mapped sidewalk ways will be a very large task that might never be finished, but that’s true of many things in OSM (e.g. keeping POIs up to date).
-
Is
name
tag appropriate? There are suggestions foris_sidepath:of:name
andstreet:name
but in practice these tags are not read by any relevant data users and even if they start being read,name
will likely continue being read as well. I understand the objection “the sidewalk itself doesn’t have a name!” but given that the data model we use is a stretch of reality (is it really two separate “highways” when split by a traffic island? is the sidewalk not part of a street?), I believe we should work with what we have, andname
isn’t wrong. -
Should I start doing it now? Up to you – I think setting names would be decently easy to do when drawing new sidewalk ways, but I don’t expect anyone else to necessarily join in.
-
Won’t they be mapped badly? That’s always a risk and there’s already sidewalks mapped poorly, e.g. as islands around a block without drawing crossings so they’re actually useless for routing. I would add a couple of precautions on the wiki page, for example matching the street name and not including the description “sidewalk” in the name, paying attention to where the sidewalk way is ending (so the name doesn’t wrap around a corner onto the wrong street) and making sure to map crossings - basically following current practice in Montreal (see around this way for what looks good to me).